Valdosta Urbanized Area

Another interesting thing from the Valdosta Transit Public Information Meeting was I was reminded of the Valdosta Urbanized Area. As you can see by the map, it extends all the way up Bemiss Road through Moody Air Force Base into Berrien County. This came up in the context of bus lines. Valdosta can run a bus to Moody, because Moody is in the Valdosta Urbanized Area.

In a larger context, local public officials often wonder aloud how they can keep landowners from selling out and developers from developing all over the county. Well, they can’t actually prevent that. (Except they already have in the Moody Exclusion Zone immediately around the AFB, but that’s not the point; in general they can’t.) But they can encourage developers not to go for cheap land way out on the edges of the county, and instead buy land near existing services (water, wastewater, busses, etc.). Cheap hookups, expedited permits, encouragement by local municipalities; these things can all help steer development.

Lowndes County and the city of Valdosta could even designate a Preferred Development Corridor and steer development there. It already exists: Valdosta up Bemiss Road towards Moody, plus the area in and around Valdosta, especially along I-75. What’s missing is official and unofficial encouragement for developers to develop there.

In addition, I keep hearing people saying there’s no farming left in Lowndes County. That’s just not true. It’s not like it was 50 years ago, sure, but there are people actively farming, and even seeking new land to rent. South Carolina promotes farming as its growth business. Lowndes County is big enough to promote both industry and farming.

Valdosta Transit Implementation Plan

A couple of weeks ago (Wednesday, Jan 7th, 2009), I went to a public meeting on a Transit Implementation Plan for the Valdosta Urbanized Area. Basically, where should the proposed Valdosta bus system run? This is part of the Valdosta Transportation Master Plan.

It was quite interesting that there was such a meeting, at which the various organizers (SGRDC, MPO, and the consultant) actively solicited input from the attendees, in both ad hoc and organized ways. First they gave a presentation and answered questions. Then they asked participants to fill out a questionnaire about where they lived, worked, and played. The presentation for that meeting is online. They even scheduled several more Public Involvement Meetings. Hm, I’m not seeing that schedule online, but presumably they’ll put it up before the meetings happen.

There was pretty good attendance: several plain citizens, the mayor, a couple of city council members, a couple of county commissioners, at least one planning commission member, a member of the Zoning Board of Appeals, a newspaper reporter, etc.

If you want a bus to run near you, I’d recommend going to one of these meetings, or contacting the organizer, Corey Hull, MPO Coordinator, 229-333-5277.

Lowndes County has a Thoroughfare Plan, which is currently being revised. We’ll see what the public input process for that turns out to be.

Solar Power in Lowndes County, Georgia

First solar installation in Lowndes County, Georgia.

Actually, I’m told there is one other, installed way back in the 1970s. However, this is the first one Colquitt Electric has had on its grid.

Since Georgia in May 2008 passed a 35% property tax rebate on solar installations, maybe we’ll see more solar around here. Especially since Congress in fall 2008 passed a 30% solar tax rebate. Add those up, and the effective price of solar comes down quite a bit.

This installation was done by Georgia Solar Power Company. Ben Browning of Georgia Solar Power brought in Craig Overmiller of Texas Solar Power Company to assist with this one, but from now on Georgia Solar Power should do fine on its own.

Click on the pictures for more pictures on flickr.

What Happened to the Canopies

A while back I posted about Partial Win: Canopies May be Saved. Here’s what happened.

Before	After	Now

You may recognize that first picture from the Nov 6th post in this blog, Save Our Canopy Road. A copy of that blog post along with a neighorhood meeting notice with the same picture was in the materials staff gave to the Commission, so both staff and Commissioners should have been aware that that entrance was the symbol of the canopy. Despite a Commissioner telling us that the county would start with some noncontentious part of the clearing, the very first thing the county did was to tear all the limbs off those signature oaks at the entrance to the north canopy, and then tear them completely down and grub up the ground like a plowed field. That and tear down the neighboring fence. Here’s another view:

What looks like a plowed field is where those oaks used to be.

Now don’t get me wrong. The entire canopy is on the right of way the county owns, and, as I’ve said numerous times in public County Commission meetings, I do appreciate the county saving at least some part of the canopy, and I especially appreciate the Commissioners literally going out of their way on Nov 9th by piling into a van and driving out there to look at the situation, and then, as Chairman Casey said in the public meeting on Nov 10th, putting his thumb in the chest of the county engineer and telling him to find a way to save the canopies. And indeed, a significant part of the canopy is saved:

County staff showed pictures like that one at the Dec 9th Commission meeting, saying the canopy was saved. Indeed, part of it was saved. But the children crying in the house nearby don’t agree that “the canopy was saved,” nor do the adjoining landowners. Why should county staff, who never paid attention to the canopy until recent months except as an impediment to their highway plan, and who wanted to tear it all down, be the judge of what saving the canopy means?

Suppose the Commissioners had told staff to save your house and they tore down your front porch and flattened your carport and then showed pictures of your house to the Commission saying “we saved the house!” Would you be satisfied?

Speaking of the carport, here’s what the south end of the north canopy now looks like:

The pile of trees on the far side used to be canopy, and the bare dirt on the near side used to be canopy.

Why did they tear down the ends of the canopy? For curves. Designed for 45 MPH. After county staff had told me they were probably going to set the speed limit at the canopies lower than that. After the owner of both sides of the road immediately north of this canopy offered them the ability to move the road over enough not to need to tear down the trees or his fence. Instead of getting back to him on that, they just went ahead and tore down the trees the same day. As that landowner, Shawn Vandemark, said:

“We were told one thing and another happened.”

What we have here is a communication problem between the county government and its citizens. It’s not as if concerns about the canopy weren’t known to the county well beforehand. Back in June county government people attended a neighborhood meeting where those concerns were expressed, and options between paving like a highway or leaving it dirt were requested. Hearing no response, I sent a letter to the county on Aug 7th detailing those and other concerns. Still no response. The first notification anyone living on the road got (as far as I know) was when I noticed a truck driving slow around the road and asked them what they were doing. “Looking to see what it will take to tear down all the trees on the right of way!” When I pointed out that we were told back in June that we would be notified 6 to 9 months before anything was done, the two guys in the truck said, laughing:

“That’s the county way!”

The county did also leave a significant part of the south canopy, and we do appreciate the Commissioners making that happen:

Although once again the county tore down the south end (not shown). Why? For a wide curve. That one I doubt is even for 45 MPH, given that it doesn’t look like they managed to acquire that much land back in the early 1990s. However, why did it even have to be 35MPH? This local rural neighborhood road doesn’t go anywhere!

The point here is that county staff did not do what the county Commission told them to do. The Commissioners left the fox in charge of the hen house, and quite a few chickens got eaten.

This has all been said directly to the county Commissioners and staff in their public meeting of Dec 9th. Some of the Commissioners had some difficulty understanding what we were complaining about. I’m spelling out this part of it here so as to make it more plain. Yes, the commissioners did go out of their way to save the canopies, and we do appreciate that. But what they said to do is not what happened. And it’s not the first time. If county staff had been taking care of business since June by communicating with residents of the road about the canopies, Commissioners wouldn’t have had any need to scurry around at the last minute. And if staff had done what the Commission told them to on Nov 10th, Commissioners wouldn’t have been listening to complaints about the canopy on Dec 9th.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. A small amount of dialog could have prevented this situation. Dialog between June and November. Dialog between county staff and the local landowner after Dec 10th. Staff could have said to him: “here’s what I understand your concerns to be and here’s what we’re going to do; how does that sound?” A few iterations like that between the county and him and other concerned parties and a result could have been arrived at that, while it may not have pleased everybody, wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem.

Here’s the newspaper version of that Dec 10th meeting. More on other topics from that meeting in another post.

If saying one thing and doing another is “the county way”, does that seem right to you?

How do we institute effective dialog between the county government and its citizens?

A Local Rural Road is Not a Collector

Quarterman Road is a local rural road through a rural neighborhood. Reclassifying it as collector and raising the speed limit would create a safety hazard.

The first map below is from the Lowndes County Thoroughfare Plan dated January 28, 2003; this is the version currently on the county’s public web pages. It plainly shows Quarterman Road (near the top center) as a local road.

The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) told me that it is possible to classify parts of a road differently, especially when the major source of traffic is (in GDOT’s example) a subdivision that is located closer to one end. This is confirmed by the second map, from the South Georgia Regional Development Center (SGRDC), Continue reading →

Congratulations to Car41No

Congratulations to Car41No for winning at least a temporary victory in keeping their two-lane blacktop from turning into Bemiss Road or worse. 500+ signatures on a petition, a letter from the city of Hahira, and assorted other means eventually did the trick.

Given the financial state of the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), it would seem only prudent not to be spending on unnecssary projects. GDOT considered layoffs back in October to stem a 200 million dollar deficit, but

Instead, board members chose to cut $52 million in state aid used to help cities and counties build and maintain roads and bridges, leaving two programs that are highly popular with local officials without a penny for the rest of this fiscal year.
— Georgia DOT avoids layoffs, Atlanta Business Chronicle – by Dave Williams Staff Writer, Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Spending $6M on old US 41 would indeed seem most imprudent at this time.

Slower is Safer

The public plan for paving Quarterman Road includes a 45 MPH speed limit. That’s too fast for a rural local road.

Even the already-paved part of Quarterman Road currently has a posted speed limit of 35 MPH (shown at right). That’s the part the subdivision uses to go to work. I have never heard anyone complain that speed limit is too low. Why, then, would anyone need a faster speed limit on the rest of Quarterman Road, which has less traffic?

As mentioned in the previous post, I understand that county staff and commissioners are concerned about their certifications, liability, and even, as we heard at the public commission meeting, about getting telephone calls in the night. Here is evidence that turning Quarterman Road into a wider, faster, collector road would not reduce any of those risks to county staff or commissioners, rather, by decreasing the safety of the road and its residents, such changes would increase risks to staff and commissioners.

First note that AASHTO itself carefully distinguishes residential neighborhoods from highways: Continue reading →

Wider is Not Safer

Wider is not safer. Wider encourages drivers to go faster, which causes more accidents. On a highway, where the point is to go faster, wider is a good idea. In a neighborhood such as Quarterman Road with small children catching the schoolbus, teenagers visiting among themselves, bicyclists, farm equipment, dogs, and horses, faster is less safe, and wider is less safe.

“Over approximately the last 60 years, the design of streets has gone from those designed to accommodate a mix of transportation options, to that designed to carry the maximum number of automobiles as fast as possible. However, not all street types serve the same purposes. Highways, freeways and the Interstate Highway System are designed for the sole purpose of maximizing the speed of travel and convenience of automobile use. Residential design must be different to accommodate the character of the street. Unfortunately, streets in residential neighborhoods are now being designed using similar standards, yielding a situation that is not only inconvenient and inefficient, but also very dangerous. Streets must be designed to maximize overall safety.
“Municipal decision makers need to take responsibility for the overall safety of the streets in their community. According to the House Committee on Public Works (U.S. Congress) (as found in A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets: 2001 by AASHTO):”
—The Relationship between Street Width and Safety Essay

Now quoting from that last cited source: Continue reading →

Partial Win: Canopies May Be Saved

As you may have seen on the front page of the VDT, the county commission did make concessions to saving the canopies on Quarterman Road:

The County overcame some objections to the project by agreeing to install curbs and gutters along the canopy sections of the road instead of the original plan that would have required clearing a wider area prior to paving. County Commissioner Richard Lee said the Quarterman Road paving project had “garnered more communication than any other project I can remember except maybe one.” Lee continued, “The commissioners have bent over backwards to try and accommodate that major concern [the tree canopies] that many of you have.” Lee went on to say, “The only final solution for making this road safe, sound and accessible consistently is for it to be paved.”

For some reason that “final solution” has an unfortunate historical ring to some of us in the path of “progress”. However, at least the commission did decide to do something about the canopies, which is good.

There’s more in the VDT story. Pictured to the right here is the current classification of Quarterman Road by the county and state, as functional classification 9, “local roads rural”. The South Georgia Regional Development Center (SGRDC, a state agency) classifies it in two parts, divided at the subdivision entrance, both as local rural road. More on that later.

County Commission Votes Tonight: Save Our Canopy Road

In a front page story in the Valdosta Daily Times, Matt Flumerfelt writes:

VALDOSTA — The Lowndes County Board of Commissioners will vote today concerning the proposed paving of Quarterman Road, located off Hambrick Tree Farm Road.
The road is already partially paved, but some community members are concerned about the trees that line a section of the road that will have to be removed in order to complete the paving project.

There’s more. He ends with:

The commission will meet tonight at 5:30 p.m. at the County Commission Building on Savannah Avenue.

If you’re heading south down Patterson Street, turn right just before the overpass. That’s Savannah Avenue. Several blocks down you’ll see the water tower, and the commission office is on the left just before you get to the tower. If the parking lot is full, you can park across the street in the county fire station lot.

We’ll see if the county will consider the idea of treating canopy roads throughout the canopy as the benefit they are to the environment, beauty, and tourism.

Canopy Roads of South Georgia

Outside the city; off the main roads.